Latest Roxane Gay Quotes from Interviews

Quotes about:

• And all the women are feminine, so we never get to see masculine presenting women and we never get to frame that as beautiful, which it is, and that's incredibly frustrating, so for every gain or benefit that the internet offers there is a liability.

  Roxane Gay

  Beautiful, Internet, Feminine

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• I like what the internet offers: the ability to get people interested in your mind, and have a chance if you're not conventionally attractive.

  Roxane Gay

  People, Mind, Chance

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• The idea of life in France is a utopia where the women are beautiful and they eat cheese all day and wear designer clothes and are magically thin and more evolved. And that's wonderful. Over here, we're still fighting for birth control.

  Roxane Gay

  Beautiful, Fighting, Birth

  Source: www.interviewmagazine.com

• Knowing that a story needs to be told is a great motivator, even if telling a given story comes at a price. Writing Hunger has been the most difficult writing of my life, and it's the rawest and perhaps most necessary. We'll see how people take it. I always strive to write beyond personal catharsis because though I write first and foremost for myself, I do recognize that I need to look outward as much if not more than I look inward, so the reader has something with which they can engage.

  Roxane Gay

  Writing, People, Hunger

  Source: www.sheknows.com

• I would like to believe that most people, regardless of gender, are good and kind. The good men in my stories are the rule. It's the bad men that are the exception and because I tend toward the dark in my fiction, you see more of the exception than the rule.

  Roxane Gay

  Believe, Dark, Men

  Source: www.sheknows.com

• When I'm editing my work, I'm looking for everything to fit, to feel seamless, for every detail or line of dialogue or scene to feel necessary and organic. I approach the writing of others in much the same way while always working to preserve the writer's voice. To allow myself to be vulnerable on the page, I tell myself no one is going to read my work. There's no way I could put myself out there otherwise.

  Roxane Gay

  Writing, Fit, Vulnerable

  Source: www.sheknows.com

• Sex offers incredible narrative opportunities and so many emotions are tied up in sex. Also, I mean, the erotic is always a fun creative space.

  Roxane Gay

  Fun, Mean, Opportunity

  Source: www.sheknows.com

• It's gut instinct that helps me determine how to write a story. I love the surreal because I am faced with the challenge of making the unbelievable believable. That challenge is thrilling.

  Roxane Gay

  Writing, Challenges, Helping

  Source: www.sheknows.com

• I would love to see more acknowledgement of how challenging it is to feel positive about fatness when you can't find clothing. When there literally is not something made for your body. Nobody ever talks about that; all those fat girl clothes swaps and stuff are for a very specific kind of fat girl. If I was Lane Bryant fat, I would be joyful about fatness.

  Roxane Gay

  Girl, Challenges, Kind

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I'm fat positive, in that I don't see fat as a bad thing. But what I do see as a bad thing is how I'm treated. I can have the most positive outlook in the world, but that is not going to change how hecklers and people walking down the street are yelling at me.

  Roxane Gay

  People, World, Walking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• It's a very weird cultural perception that if you're fat you're dumb, that you're lazy or a loser. Clearly, those are the preconditions for fatness. You're a failure, because only a lazy person, only a dumb person, would allow themselves to get into this situation. It's appalling that this is the mindset. People generally treat fat people like we don't know anything about anything. It's incredibly demeaning. And incredibly frustrating.

  Roxane Gay

  People, Dumb, Lazy

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• Generally, the ways we discuss the fat body pathologize it; we treat it as a medical problem and/or a social problem that must be solved. "Morbid obesity" is in many ways saying we are the walking dead. Or walking to our death. And that is no way to live, with that sort of moniker hanging over your head at all times. I think it forces fat people to internalize a lot of unnecessary self-loathing.

  Roxane Gay

  Thinking, People, Walking Dead

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• The more successful I get, the more I am reminded that in the minds of a great many people I will never be anything more than my body. No matter what I accomplish, I will be fat, first and foremost.

  Roxane Gay

  Successful, People, Mind

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I think hunger is a natural state of being for most people. I mean, hunger is a desire - and you don't only have physical hunger, you have emotional hunger. A lot of my hungers are, in fact, emotional. I think a lot of fat people's hungers are emotional. There are things we very much want, and it can be so difficult to satisfy those hungers. Yet we try. We try so hard.

  Roxane Gay

  Mean, Emotional, Thinking

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I thought a lot about how so many memoirs about fatness focus on weight loss; they don't focus on living with weight in a world that is rather inhospitable to it. So I knew that was the idea that was going to be most interesting and most challenging, and I like to be challenged as a writer.

  Roxane Gay

  Loss, Interesting, Focus

  Source: www.guernicamag.com

• I write for myself, first and foremost and I also write for people, mostly women, who just want to be seen and heard and all too often aren't.

  Roxane Gay

  Writing, People, Want

  Source: therumpus.net

• Most of the time, writing is a lot of fun, and not a small amount of self-medication.

  Roxane Gay

  Fun, Writing, Self

  Source: therumpus.net

• The actual act of writing brings me such pleasure - to tell stories, to engage in cultural criticism, to reflect, to question, all of it is invigorating.

  Roxane Gay

  Writing, Criticism, Stories

  Source: therumpus.net

• I write because I love doing it.

  Roxane Gay

  Writing

  Source: therumpus.net

• Good fiction challenges us as much as it entertains and these days, we could do with both of these things.

  Roxane Gay

  Challenges, Fiction, These Days

  Source: therumpus.net

• Fiction offers escape but it also interrogates the world we live in, whether the past, present or future.

  Roxane Gay

  Past, Fiction, World

  Source: therumpus.net

• I look at my older writing to see where my weaknesses are and then I try to address those weaknesses and make new mistakes.

  Roxane Gay

  Mistake, Writing, Trying

  Source: therumpus.net

• I read constantly because there is so much to learn from the writing in the world.

  Roxane Gay

  Writing, World

  Source: therumpus.net

• I am fine with my books being categorized as African-American literature but I hope they are also considered Haitian-American literature and American literature. All of these things are part of who I am and what I write.

  Roxane Gay

  Book, Writing, Who I Am

  Source: therumpus.net

• The designation is useful and necessary and sometimes limiting but it is only limiting to people who think, for example, that African-American literature couldn't possibly be something they could be interested in or relate to. They have limited imaginations, which is sad.

  Roxane Gay

  Thinking, People, Imagination

  Source: therumpus.net